Thieving Fear

TWENTY-SEVEN

The express was more than an hour out of Leeds, and flanked by suburbs as bad as identical, when Hugh ceased to be able to silence his doubts. 'This is wrong.'

Ellen opened her eyes as if they were sluggish with gum. 'Don't say you're having second thoughts after we've been to all this trouble.'

Perhaps she was thinking of the farce outside the hospital, where he had looked the wrong way for the first three taxis she'd elected him to hail. Or she might be remembering how his disorientation and her loathing of spectators had almost made them miss the train once she'd succeeded in ushering him through the crowd to buy tickets. He'd spent most of the journey gazing at her, largely so that the views from the train wouldn't snatch away any lingering sense of direction, but could she think he was striving to convince her that she didn't revolt him? Of course she didn't, though he had to stifle his dismay at the sight of the frail undernourished sufferer she'd become in case she mistook it for disgust. 'I'm not,' he said, and when her depleted face worked as if she wished she could slough it 'You aren't, are you?'

'I'm not my cousin, Hugh.'

'Charlotte, you mean.' Since she wasn't there he risked saying 'I wouldn't want you to be.'

'We shouldn't put her down. She's done a lot for me.'

Beyond Ellen heads swayed gently with the motion of the train, and Hugh had to tell himself that none of them was shaking in mockery of his remark, let alone too thin to be decently alive. If anyone like that was behind him, surely Ellen would have noticed, but in a sense it was the lack of intrusion that bothered him. 'Is it hard for you, doing this?' he said.

'No harder than it's been for you, I should think.'

'That's what I was getting at. That's what's wrong.'

'You're saying you'd like me to feel worse.'

'You know I wouldn't like it. I'm asking if you do.'

'Well, you're certainly making it happen,' Ellen said with a kind of anguished triumph.

Hugh stretched out his hands, only for her gaze to weigh them down until they sank to his knees. 'I don't mean to, but –'

'Just leave well alone, Hugh.' Ellen's lips worked on their shape before she gave in to adding 'Except well isn't the word.'

'It will be,' Hugh said and advanced his hands again. 'I promise.'

A hint of affection not entirely divorced from amusement glimmered in her eyes. 'What are you trying to promise me, Hugh?'

'To stop what's happening to you. What you think is happening. What he's making you think.'

Each variation seemed less able to reach her. Perhaps they were driving her further inside her head – and then Hugh realised that his hands were hovering as if he couldn't bear to touch her. Before he had time to be inhibited by his clumsiness, he took hold of her arms. The sleeves of her crumpled garment yielded even more than he was afraid they would, and his innards quailed as he felt how gaunt her arms had grown, but he held her as she did her best to draw back. 'Don't, Hugh,' she said low and unevenly. 'Especially not here.'

'Why not here?' His head was filling with a mass of stale perfume and the drunken rocking of the carriage, but he didn't let go. 'What don't you want people to see?'

'You can't still need to ask that. You aren't so lacking in imagination.'

'I don't mind if they all look. They're welcome to see how much I care about you.' Though his face was growing more uncomfortably hot than any childhood fever, and he seemed to be clinging to her so that his hands wouldn't betray his awkwardness, none of this could silence him. 'I'm not doing this just for Rory,' he blundered onwards. 'It's mostly for you.'

'If you say so, but you're hurting me.'

He was about to take this as a simple rebuff when he grasped that he might be bruising her starved arms. He released them so hastily that he wondered if he seemed eager to be done with touching her. As he patted them to compensate, a jerk of the train flung him back on his seat. 'That wasn't me,' he protested. 'It was the driver.'

'You're a good person, Hugh. We all know you are.'

He felt as if she'd placed him at a distance far greater than the gap between the seats, and so he could only return to his dogged subject. 'Do you understand what I was trying to say now at least?'

'Are we back at that again? Can't we find our way away from it and leave it alone?'

Though her choice of words seemed thoughtless, Hugh managed to say only 'Don't you think someone else is?'

'I've no idea what you're asking me to think.'

'I don't want to say too much.'

'You are, though. It just isn't making a great deal of sense.'

Hugh leaned forwards, gripping the edge of the seat to reassure Ellen that he wasn't about to grab her. 'Suppose talking about you know who brings him?' he said barely louder than the monologue of the wheels.

'Too many people around, Hugh.'

He was behaving irrationally in at least one way: it surely couldn't matter how quietly or otherwise he spoke. He sat back, to Ellen's visible relief, before saying 'Now we're on our way you know where to do you know what, shouldn't he be trying to make things worse for us?'

Hugh had begun to wonder if she found his language childish by the time she said 'Perhaps he's distracted by us splitting up.'

'Leaving the others at the hospital, you mean.' When she confirmed this with a solitary nod Hugh said 'But he made us all have nightmares when we weren't together.'

'Maybe it takes more of an effort to keep them up.'

'Suppose it's to make us think he doesn't care if we find him?'

'I think you were right before. We ought to stop talking about it. Let's concentrate on getting there and seeing what can be done.'

This made Hugh more aware of the purpose of their journey than he wanted to anticipate. Perhaps Ellen sensed his disquiet, because she said 'Think of Rory if it helps.'

It almost did, but only for a moment. 'Maybe he's there,' Hugh blurted. 'Him.'

'I thought we said that's just a kind of nightmare.'

'He could be busy doing something to Rory. Suppose that's why we're being left alone?'

'I expect Charlotte would call us if there were any developments.'

'We should have asked her to.' Hugh dragged his mobile from whichever pocket it was in. 'I want to be sure,' he felt defiant for saying.

He'd begun to wonder if some event at the hospital was distracting Charlotte by the time she said 'Where have you got to?'

He could have done without her turn of phrase. 'We're on the train,' he said.

'I thought you'd have to be. Any problem?'

'Not here, well, not more than we've been having. How about there?'

'Just the same as when you left.' Before Hugh could decide whether this contained any accusation Charlotte said 'Sorry, I should have thought. I didn't notice.'

'What didn't you? What's wrong?'

'Quiet a moment, Hugh. You're right, absolutely. It's going off. I'll take it out if I need to.' Closer to the phone she said 'We aren't meant to use mobiles in here. There's a sign at the entrance, apparently.'

'We just wondered how Rory's getting on. Will you let us know if there's any change?'

'So long as I can reach you.'

'Why shouldn't you be able to?'

'You'll have to go underground, won't you? Sorry,' she added, not addressing him. 'I have to go now, Hugh.'

'All right, maybe we'll talk again.'

As he wished he hadn't made the prospect sound uncertain Ellen said 'Hold on. Tell her hold on.'

'Ellen wants a word.'

'She'll have to wait until I go outside.'

Ellen tugged one of her hands from beneath her and inched it forwards, then shoved it back into hiding. 'Doesn't she want to speak to me?'

'Of course she does. She just can't in the hospital. She's going where she can.'

Ellen's gaze was sinking inwards by the time her mobile came to life. It sang O at length and eventually arrived at klahoma, the final vowel of which she thumbed off. 'Charlotte?' she said. 'You'll want to be part of this, Hugh.'

She switched on the loudspeaker and laid the phone next to her before sitting on her hand again. 'I was thinking, we never called Glen back.'

'It sounded as if he'd finished to me, but I can give you his number.'

'Do you think it might be better if you rang him? He won't know mine, so he mightn't answer it. You could always tell him it's for my book. I just thought we should find out if he had anything else to say about, you know, why he rang before.'

Charlotte sighed or made hard work of a breath. 'I'll see if there's anything to get out of him. It can be my excuse to stay out here for a few minutes.'

With that she was gone as though the impatient clawlike clicking of the wheels had surged to drag her down. Ellen's hand crept out to finger a key and retreated into hiding. Hugh levelled an encouraging gaze at her, even once his eyes began to smart with the prolongation of the task. She might have been holding herself rigid in anticipation of the call, but the motion of the train assailed her with the occasional shiver. When the phone began to sing its tinny O she jabbed a key and snatched her hand back. At first Hugh thought she'd broken the connection in her haste, and then he heard a voice, muffled enough to be buried. 'You need to put the loudspeaker on again,' he said and activated it for her.

'Glen isn't answering, you two. I've left a message for him to call one of us.'

'You aren't waiting outside till he does,' Hugh protested.

'I'm not, that's right. I'm going to Rory in a minute. In fact, make that now.'

The clamour of an ambulance had begun to overwhelm her voice. Hugh had the disorienting impression that the artificial wail was rising from beneath the carriage or even from underground. It grew muddily blurred as it filled the loudspeaker, and then it sank into silence, but not before drawing a bony hand into sight behind Ellen's head.

Hugh didn't know whether he was more dismayed by it or by how Ellen might react when she noticed it. He was panicking over where to look when Charlotte said 'If anyone needs to call me I'll have the phone on mute.'

'Thanks, Charlotte,' Ellen said. 'We'll know you're there.'

'Good luck then. Be careful,' Charlotte added and might have been searching for less of a cliché as the owner of the hand peered between the seats. She was a pensioner whose reddish hair and bony face looked faded as an early photograph. 'Would you care to turn that down?' she said. 'We don't all want to hear your business.'

'Goodbye, Charlotte,' Hugh called, possibly in time for her to hear. 'Gone now,' he told the pensioner. 'Is it all right if we talk?' This sent her back into her seat, but her intrusion felt too much like an omen of a worse one, and left Hugh with such a sense of being spied upon that he was afraid of making some disastrous mistake out of nervousness. 'Let's talk,' he appealed to Ellen. 'It doesn't matter what about. Anything except, anything else at all.'